Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday November 17, 2012 @02:29PM
from the want-edit-mode-by-default dept.

First time accepted submitter azadnama writes "Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, is aware of the fact the MediaWiki formatting syntax is a major obstacle for people's participation in writing on the site. To address this problem, the Foundation is developing VisualEditor—a web-based WYSIWYG interface for editing articles. It's supposed to be similar to a word processor, like LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, Pages, Google Docs, and others. And this is the time to ask: What did your word processor get wrong and how can Wikipedia's VisualEditor get it right?"

Their lack of coherent coding and / or a WYSIWYG editor is the LEAST of WikiMedia / WikiPedia's issues.

Number one issue keeping new blood away: Asshat editors-for-life with "ownership" issues, who park their fat asses on various pages / subjects / media classes, and shit diarrhea on any "newbe" who dares add / change / question so much as punctuation...

Wikipedia shares your concerns about structured data being indexed in a completely unstructured manner, and they have launched the WikiData (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata) project to correct this. In the foreseeable future, your vision of creating lists and infoboxes through a SELECT-like statement will be realized.

Semantic Wikis have also tried to address this problem (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/) but they have suffered from too-tight coupling between pages and the data lying on them.